Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot

by Project Itoh

  Genetic control. Information control. Emotion control.

  Battlefield control.

  Everything was monitored and kept under control.

  The PMCs were supervised and controlled. Battlefields, once the embodiment of chaos, were regulated, made routine.

  Supervised battlefields. Supervised lives. Not the war to which Snake had become accustomed.

  But even if the war had changed, Snake still had a role he must play in it.

  His last role. His life’s finale.

  To stop his brother’s plan to throw the world into chaos.

  Three days earlier, I’d briefed Snake on his final mission.

  The rotor blades of my helicopter hung over the cemetery, the downwash spurring the carpet of flowers into a mad dance. I climbed down from the helicopter and landed in the white field of the virtuous stars-of-Bethlehem and walked toward Snake, who stood fixed before one of the graves.

  The graves belonged to warriors never spoken about—those convicted of war crimes, those whose records for some reason had all been stricken. Among them, some were regarded as heroes by more than a few soldiers.

  Snake’s back was to me, and he didn’t speak loudly, but his low, powerful rumble carried clearly over the rotor’s noise. “Otacon, even the dead have ears.”

  “Snake, we’ve got to go.”

  He turned to give me a dubious look. I responded, “You’ve got an old friend waiting for you in the helicopter.”

  He followed me through the rows of tombstones. Then, he said, “The test results …”

  My reply caught in my mouth. Of course I’d known he’d ask. I’d thought and thought about how to tell him, but still I had no idea what I should say.

  I started with the scientific facts. I tried to present them as objectively as possible.

  “Proteome analysis was positive. But the mRNA analysis turned up negative. The wrinkled skin, the hardened arteries … Your early aging symptoms look like classic Werner syndrome. But none of the tests were able to pinpoint the cause.”

  “So?”

  Snake wanted to cut to the heart of the matter—the painful end that awaited his body.

  He wasn’t afraid. He’d seen his body dying, and he’d accepted it. He’d accepted that he wasn’t human, that he wasn’t born from nature. From the very beginning, he’d seemingly accepted the fate that awaited his cloned body.

  I was the one who couldn’t accept it.

  “Well … judging by how rapidly the aging has progressed, I’d say …”

  My words trailed off. Snake was waiting for me to continue. I had to tell him. I had to give him the truth. He was ready to hear it; he’d long been ready.

  But my throat was frozen with sorrow and fear. I opened my mouth, but no voice came. Instead, I felt tears well up.

  “A year at best, right?”

  My reply felt hollow. “Yeah …”

  Snake paused to gaze at the bed of blooming flowers and the white petals kicked up into the air by the helicopter’s wind. He watched them as if his life were floating away.

  There was such sadness in his eyes, I found myself saying, “Snake … let’s try another doctor.”

  “Some ordinary doctor won’t make any difference. I’m not an ordinary man to begin with. Not to mention FOXDIE.”

  “You’re right.”

  FOXDIE, a virus programmed to selectively kill specific people, had been injected into Snake’s body as part of a plan nine years prior to annihilate the terrorist group FOXHOUND. It still lived on inside him.

  I added, “But we don’t know where Naomi is …”

  Even if we found her, would she be able to do anything?

  It was then I realized I was clinging to a narrow hope. No one in the world would better understand Snake’s cloned body than Dr. Naomi Hunter. She had participated in the mission at Shadow Moses Island and helped create the FOXDIE virus.

  But would she be able to stop his relentless aging?

  I couldn’t make myself think so. To a stranger, he’d likely seem to be in his seventies. In actuality, he was still in his forties. An ordinary man experiencing such rapid aging would be inconceivable. This was clearly a genetic disease stemming from his manipulated genome.

  But old age was old age. No matter how extraordinary the circumstances of this one case, aging remained a mechanism within all life—a mechanism that mankind had not yet devised a method to halt. No one could escape death from old age. Neither I, nor Snake, could believe that Naomi would have any power to prevent it.

  Snake turned at the sound of a familiar voice calling his name. An elderly man was seated in the back of the helicopter, leaning on a cane for support.

  “Colonel!” Snake said, and I was relieved to hear a little brightness, no matter how brief, return to Snake’s voice. Snake and I climbed into the helicopter, and he shook Colonel Roy Campbell’s hand.

  “I’m not a colonel anymore, Snake.”

  Campbell had long since retired from the military. But to Snake, he was both a superior officer and a friend, and he would always be Colonel.

  Snake noticed Campbell’s suit and grinned. This was the first time he’d encountered the man in anything but a uniform.

  “I’d figured the only place I’d ever see you dressed like that would be at your daughter’s wedding.”

  Campbell’s face briefly darkened. Meryl. She was his daughter, though he still hadn’t been able to tell her as much. Meryl was the result of an affair—with his sister-in-law. Campbell’s brother later died in the Gulf War, and the colonel seemed too ashamed to tell her the truth. She knew Campbell only as her uncle.

  We all are burdened by our sins. Even Campbell.

  Even me.

  Snake asked, “What are you doing these days?”

  Campbell pulled himself back from thoughts of his daughter and replied, “I’m working for an organization under the UN Security Council—the analysis and assessment staff of the PMC Oversight and Inspection Committee.”

  “I remember the resolution being passed a few years ago.”

  “Snake, I came across some information in my work.”

  Snake narrowed his eyes.

  Campbell continued. “We’ve found him … in the Middle East.”

  Him. Snake knew who that was in an instant.

  “We’ve got to stop him,” the colonel said. “Now. Before it’s too late.”

  Snake looked at me.

  I nodded. “Liquid’s made his move.”

  The whir of the helicopter’s rotor increased in pitch. The aircraft lifted off the ground, and the white stars-of-Bethlehem quickly faded into the distance.

  “The Manhattan Incident triggered a serious public backlash,” Campbell explained. “Now the US has to think twice before intervening militarily in other countries’ affairs. This has fueled a push toward military privatization, with PMCs at the heart of that movement.”

  “Every age has its mercenaries,” Snake said. “These PMCs are nothing new—we’ve been dealing with them since before the turn of the century.”

  “No, Snake. They’re nothing like the mercenaries of the past. The Department of Defense’s new battlefield control system has produced a decisive difference between the hired guns of the past and the PMCs of today.”

  I added, “The system was developed by ArmsTech Security.”

  A glimmer of recognition came to Snake’s eyes. “ArmsTech? You mean AT Corp?”

  Campbell nodded. “In recent years, AT Corp has shifted focus from weapons development to security tools. And since the establishment of AT Security, business has been booming. The system makes it possible to integrate not only micro-level information on individual soldiers and units, but also macro-level information about field conditions and order of battle.”

  Snake sighed. In an effort to recreate the prosperity of the Atomic Age in the post–Cold War world, ArmsTech and DARPA had worked together on the Metal Gear REX project. After the Shadow Moses incident and the death of A
rmsTech’s president as a result of FOXDIE, the company fell on hard times, but now it had undergone an unorthodox restructuring. If that president could now see the fruits of his labors, I wondered if he’d laugh.

  “So,” Snake said, “they’ve finally managed total real-time battlefield control?”

  Campbell nodded again. “There’s more. State governments and rebel groups can’t match the maintenance price of standing forces. PMCs, by comparison, are reliable, easy to use. It wasn’t long before everyone had them on the payroll. And as a result, regular armies began to decline worldwide.”

  I thought back to the graveyard of fallen warriors. The legendary mercenary, Big Boss, and the true patriot, The Boss—and all the other soldiers buried there—had fought for nations.

  War has changed. Now there was no place for heroes or legends. They had been replaced with pure profit and efficiency.

  “It’s hard to believe, I know,” Campbell said, “but PMCs are beginning to overtake conventional armies in terms of scale. Nowadays it’s the PMCs that serve as standard battalions. They already make up sixty percent of all combat forces in conflict zones.”

  Snake was taken aback. “Sixty percent …”

  “The fact is the world now depends largely on PMCs for waging its wars.”

  “I thought it was the UN that authorized the PMCs in the first place.”

  “The US abstained from voting on that resolution. In effect, Washington was endorsing PMCs without ever revealing its true intentions.” Campbell drew in a deep breath. “Until they got wind of the uprising, that is.”

  I pulled a report out of my briefcase and handed it to Snake. The documents outlined the five major PMCs—Pieuvre Armement, Raven Sword, Werewolf, Otselotovaya Khvatka, and Praying Mantis.

  “There are hundreds of PMCs in business worldwide,” I explained, “and their numbers are growing. Currently, five of them are big enough to be labeled global powers—two in the US, and one each in the UK, France, and Russia.”

  Campbell nodded. “Reconnaissance has revealed that those five PMCs are run by dummy corporations that act as fronts for a single mother company. Its name—‘Outer Heaven.’ ”

  Snake’s eyes popped open. “You mean …”

  Outer Heaven. The place where soldiers could always find sanctuary. Big Boss had founded the mercenary agency, and Liquid Snake—his son and Solid Snake’s brother—had attempted to reestablish it at Shadow Moses Island.

  “That’s right,” Campbell said. “It’s Liquid. He’s taken command of this immense army and is now preparing to unleash an insurrection.”

  “I watched him die.”

  That was at Shadow Moses. Liquid was killed by Naomi’s modified strain of FOXDIE.

  “His will lives on,” the colonel explained, “in the body of the man once known as Ocelot. He aims to fan the flames of war even higher—to create the perfect world once envisioned by Big Boss.”

  “The one world in which soldiers will always have a place.”

  A world where soldiers were needed. A world where a soldier could say, “This is where I belong.” Many times had Big Boss and Liquid Snake sought to bring about that world, and many times had Solid Snake stopped them.

  The world envisioned by Big Boss was one in a constant state of war—a world where soldiers were needed in every nation; a world whose peoples killed each other endlessly.

  It was time for Campbell to say what he had come to say. “He must be stopped—before it’s too late.”

  Snake didn’t say anything. Instead, he gazed out the window of the helicopter at the passing scenery below. I looked at his face, and in his eyes I saw such deep resolve and such strong will that I was nearly moved to tears.

  Even now his body continued its slow, relentless deterioration. My friend was dying. His hypertrophic heart, enlarged like a piece of old, stretched-out rubber, hadn’t the strength to send blood circulating through his body. His lungs, stiffened by pulmonary fibrosis, could no longer absorb enough oxygen.

  But even with his body tortured by those and countless other afflictions, Snake continued to fight—to set right his curse, one not of his choice but rather placed upon him before he had been granted life in this world.

  The helicopter tilted forward, and through the windows I saw Nomad, a large military transport plane with a capacity that put the USAF’s Globemaster to shame, parked on an airport runway below. Its cargo bay could hold our helicopter with room to spare.

  We landed on the tarmac, climbed out of the chopper, and ran to Nomad.

  As we closed the distance, Campbell said, “Do you understand, Snake? Any means necessary. Just stop Liquid’s insurrection. Even if it means—”

  The colonel fell silent and stopped in place. We all did, and Snake stared right at Campbell, who looked away with a tortured expression.

  “Killing him?” Snake spoke with no emotion in his voice. “You want Liquid dead. Isn’t that right, Colonel?”

  Campbell closed his eyes, cursing himself for asking the friend he’d been with through so many battles to perform what was essentially a murder.

  “I’m sorry. I know … this isn’t justice. It’s a covert assignment—a hired hit. A wetworks op targeting the head of a major multinational corporation.”

  I shook my head. We’d been through a lot together, the three of us—the destruction of secret weaponry, the rescue of a kidnapped scientist, the prevention of a nuclear attack. And I’m not implying that we didn’t have blood on our hands. But this would be the first time the mission was simply to kill.

  Our last mission together would be to kill a man because we wanted him dead.

  A cool, pleasant breeze blew across the open runway in open defiance of our solemn mood. The sky was clear and blue.

  Snake looked up at the sun and then started to run toward Nomad. We followed.

  “Why me?” Snake asked.

  “Because of the military might of the PMCs and the effect they have on the economy. War is to the twenty-first century what oil was to the twentieth—the pillar that supports the global economy. The global community is concerned, but they’re all too afraid of the war economy collapsing to do anything about it. The UN too.”

  “And any intervention through official channels would damage the economic system. America can’t step in, and neither can the UN. So it falls to us outcasts to do something about it. Is that it, Colonel?”

  “America has now turned war into a form of economic activity. Analysts are calling it the ‘war economy,’ in that it’s picking up the slack for the downward-sloping oil market.”

  “Sounds pretty self-serving to me.”

  “Snake, this mission isn’t an order from Washington—not like the old days. And it’s not something the UN can officially sanction either. But we can’t just look the other way while Liquid plots this insurrection. If we fail to act, he’ll become the greatest threat the world has ever faced.”

  We’d reached Nomad. The hatch at the rear of the transport yawned open, revealing the massive, empty cargo bay. I lent Campbell my arm as we climbed up the ramp.

  Once inside, Campbell stopped and looked into Snake’s eyes.

  “Snake, you’re the only man I can trust.”

  Snake returned the colonel’s stare.

  We’d arrived at our final destiny.

  Kill Liquid. Sure, we could run. Sure, we could close our eyes. But in the end, we wouldn’t be able to escape our fate.

  “Fine,” Snake said. “Let’s hear it.”

  Snake pointed to a set of chairs in the temporary command center the colonel and I had established in the fore of the cargo bay. Even though the mission was urgent, the flight would be long, and Nomad was suitably equipped. There was a workstation complete with multiple LCD monitors connected to Nomad’s supercomputer, Gaudi. Equipment useful for military applications, including a medical bed, were readily available. A gangway led to upper-level living quarters complete with a bed, a shower, a kitchen, and a bathroom.


  Campbell sat on a backless folding chair. “Our intelligence on Liquid’s uprising originally comes via reports from US Special Forces, who were mobilized after we at the UN reported our findings. They’re tracking Liquid’s movements. About eighteen hours ago, he was spotted in the Middle East.”

  The colonel shifted his posture, unable to find a comfortable way to sit. “There’s a rebel army there made up of ethnic minorities waging civil war against the regime in power. The core of that regime’s army is provided by one of the PMCs under Liquid’s control.”

  “What about the rebels?” Snake asked.

  “The local militias have hired small numbers of operators as trainers and field commanders. And of course, they’ve got help from the local PMCs.”

  “Right,” I added. “A proxy war between hired guns.”

  PMC versus PMC. A quagmire of war. All-too-typical victims of the new world economy.

  Snake pulled out another cigarette. As he searched his pockets for a lighter, Sunny bounded down the gangway and snatched the unlit cigarette from his lips.

  “S-Snake,” the little girl said, “th-this is a non-smoking flight …”

  Snake gave her a chagrined smile and scratched his head.

  A dumbstruck Campbell watched the child go back upstairs and said, “She’s … ?”

  “Olga’s daughter,” I said.

  With a look of understanding, the colonel said, “The woman from the Manhattan Incident? The one with the daughter kidnapped by the Patriots to extort her cooperation?”

  “Yes, that’s her. Raiden rescued Sunny from the Patriots, and we took her in.”

  “Where’s Raiden now?”

  “I don’t know. After he saved Sunny, we lost all trace of him.”

  Raiden.

  When the president was kidnapped in a marine decontamination facility thirty kilometers from Manhattan, Raiden had been at first an unwitting pawn of the Patriots. But he joined us in that fight against Solidus Snake, the third “son” and clone of Big Boss—although the events ended in violence.

  Truthfully, Solidus—and Liquid—were only struggling for freedom. They put their very existences on the line, resisting the secret organization, the Patriots, who attempted to control all reality. Looking back now, in the context of the Patriots, that shadow network that manipulated America and the world, I couldn’t label Liquid and Solidus as simply evil.